Despite a cultural push to be neutral or even indifferent about the sex of their babies, university-educated Canadians overwhelmingly prefer to have a child of their own gender as they unconsciously try to create a “meme” of themselves to live on after they die, a new study suggests.

Fifty or even 20 years ago, the same study of evolutionary biology might have veered heavily in favour of boys — the traditional breadwinners, deemed to be physiologically stronger and with a greater capacity to produce more children and grandchildren. It’s a value that still exists in many parts of the world.

But the major strides made by women in modern Western society have meant there’s never been a better time to be born a girl —and women are keenly aware of it, said Lonnie Aarssen, a Queen’s University biology professor who co-authored the study with former undergraduate student Michael Higginson.

“It’s interesting to see this emergence just in my lifetime of opportunities for women to break free from that patriarchal subjugation,” he said. “And it’s being expressed as a flip now to actually favouring offspring that have potential to represent copies of themselves because they’re the same gender.”

This is particularly linked to women seeing themselves as able to leave some kind of role model legacy for their daughters because they see greater opportunities for them today, Dr. Aarssen added.

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The study — an online survey of 2,387 people, mostly female Queen’s University students —asked participants to give their age, gender, marital status, cultural background and highest level of education completed. Then they answered a series of questions including what gender they would prefer their firstborn child to be, if they were to have more than one child would they prefer the majority to be male or female and if they were to have one child, what gender would they like it to be? They were only given the option of male or female, but it was made clear they didn’t have to answer all of the questions if they felt uncomfortable, Dr. Aarssen writes in the study —the lack of options meant to prevent people from offering a politically correct answer.

Researchers found that in each scenario, the overwhelming majority picked their own gender.

“Our first expectation was that we’d probably find a really strong signal for preference for sons, because that’s been the tradition,” Dr. Aarssen said. “But we didn’t expect to see it so strongly, especially in a country like Canada. We really do conspicuously embrace gender neutrality — it’s taught in schools and it’s promoted everywhere, really.”

The preference for a child of the same gender likely comes from a desire for legacy-building, Dr. Aarssen said.

“From an evolutionary point of view, my feeling is this is linked through an awareness that we don’t have immortality. We’re the only species that is terrorized by the fact that we’re going to die,” he said, adding that we’re “hard-wired” to seek some way of leaving parts of ourselves behind, whether it be closets of trophies or a fine memory of what moral people we were.

Joan Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, said parents often want to recreate with their young ones the childhood activities of their youth —fathers bonding with their sons through boy culture that might involve signing them up for Little League —thus explaining the desire for a child of their gender.

“The glass is half full because what it shows is that there’s no longer a consensus between men and women that boys are better,” said the author of the 2010 book Reshaping the Work Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter. “But it’s also half empty because it shows the different childhood cultures of boys and girls remain really quite separate despite all of our best efforts.”

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